Andrew Solomon Reflects on Resilience

In Andrew Solomon’s award-winning memoir “The Noonday Demon” he explored depression, recovery and resilience through his experiences and a larger scientific and cultural lens.

By Lori Hile

“I can’t imagine myself without depression,” writer Andrew Solomon tells a roomful of therapists, educators, and peers gathered for his keynote address at the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance (DBSA) national conference in Chicago.

Can this vibrant presenter really be a famous chronicler of his own profound depression?

Readers introduced to Solomon in his memoir The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression got to know an eloquent and introspective man—but one plagued by the twin devils of depression and anxiety. Solomon doesn’t sugarcoat his struggles in the book, detailing his symptoms and treatments while also examining the disorder through a scientific and cultural lens.

The book nabbed the 2001 National Book Award and was short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize. At a time when admitting to depression incurred even more serious stigma than today, his narrative helped raise awareness and shift public perception.

Solomon describes some of his battles to the DBSA audience, starting with his first major depressive episode in 1994. Over the previous three years he had endured several foundation-shaking events—his mother’s death, the end of a relationship, moving back to the U.S. from overseas—and emerged seemingly unscathed. Ironically, it was at a more positive milestone that serious symptoms of depression set in.

On the cusp of publishing his first novel, he experienced a loss of interest in almost everything. The thought of seeing friends or performing simple tasks triggered exhaustion and a sense of dread. One morning, he woke up and felt literally paralyzed, unable to budge from bed or pick up the phone.

That night—at age 30, with a master’s degree in English under his belt—he moved back home with his father. The older man had to assist with any number of everyday functions, including cutting Solomon’s food for him.

As if that wasn’t humiliating and excruciating enough, the illness packed a secondary punch–a feeling of “free-floating” anxiety he describes as “horrific every single second.”

The process of recovery went in spurts and starts as Solomon went on and off medication at least six times. Ultimately he realized that “depression is a cyclical illness and that dealing with it requires a long-term commitment.”

Over the years he has assembled a combination of supports that hold his demons at bay.

“I take medication, I’m in psychotherapy, and I’ve attempted to surround myself with love. I think that those are all incredibly helpful. Maybe it’s somehow a placebo effect, but whatever it is, it appears to be working.”

Embracing his depression—or at least accepting it as a permanent part of who he is in the world—has also been central to his recovery. In many ways, writing Noonday Demon was an attempt to understand his relationship with this tenacious visitor.

It was also an attempt to puzzle out the secret of resilience—why some people dealt with acute depressive symptoms yet still found meaning in their lives, while others appeared to be completely disabled by relatively mild symptoms.

An open book

Solomon knew he risked stigmatization by publicly plumbing the depths of his despair.

“I felt it needed to be spoken about,” he tells esperanza in a brief interview after the lecture.

As a gay man who grew up in the days when Time magazine derided homosexuality as “a pathetic second-rate substitute for life,” Solomon knew a little something about overcoming stigmatization.

Never a strong fit with masculine norms, Solomon says he was bullied steadily from grade school through high school. As he became aware of his homosexuality in adolescence, he worried that he would be a disappointment to his parents and spend his future “on the margins.”

Solomon says he grew up hearing from his mother “that family was the most important thing there was,” and for years he was convinced that being gay meant he would never have a family of his own. He even enrolled himself in sexual surrogacy therapy in a desperate attempt to turn straight.

He grappled with his sexual identity throughout college. He moved to England afterward, partly to figure himself out, and gradually came through his confusion and into the open.

“There is a point which I sort of admitted to it, but wished it weren’t true. Then I eventually got to the point of thinking, ‘Actually, it’s who I am.’ ”

He wasn’t about to repeat that whole painful process with this new element in his life.

“It took a long time to get out of the closet,” he says, “and I was darn well not going to go into some other closet and have this secret…. If I was dealing with [depression], I was going to be open and direct about it.”

After the book launched, Solomon received some hate mail from strangers telling him, “We don’t need crazy people like you,” and accusing him of shilling for Big Pharma (his father, Howard Solomon, has spent decades leading a major pharmaceutical company). Still, he says, “the vast amount of correspondence was from people who said they were helped.”

And then, of course, there was that little bonus called the National Book Award, the prestigious U.S. literary prize. “I said on the day [I received it], if you want to get ‘undepressed,’ try winning the National Book Award,” Solomon quips. “It feels like recognition not only for my literary enterprise but also for the validity of this as a subject of public conversation.”

It’s a conversation Solomon is passionate about having on behalf of the many people worldwide who lack the resources to get help. In a new chapter Solomon wrote for the 2015 edition of Noonday Demon, he laments that only 1 in 12 individuals with depression receive treatment, and often it is inadequate treatment.

“Mental health is not a luxury,” he says, visibly frustrated. “Access to decent care and the ability to function at your maximum level … should be available to everyone.”

Inspired by a study where low-income individuals with depression were successfully and dramatically treated, Solomon tried to convince U.S. lawmakers to expand mental health care programs for the poor, only to be told that poor people don’t vote. If he wanted to help them, he needed to make voters care about seeing changes.

So Solomon continues doing what he does best: telling stories that otherwise might not get told. In a New York Times Sunday Magazine cover story last year, he tackled the issue of depression during pregnancy. (Solomon was awarded a doctorate in psychology from Cambridge University in 2013 for his research on maternal identity in pregnant women and new mothers.)

Dad material

Creating a family, albeit a modern and complicated one, has been a tonic for Solomon. That neither marriage nor fatherhood come easily for a gay man makes those bonds that much more precious.

Solomon met fellow journalist John Habich on his book tour for Noonday Demon in 2001 and both were soon smitten. Enamored and enriched by Habich’s quick wit and deep kindness, Solomon told the New York Times that, “John became, in some ways, the cure for my depression.”

The two were wed in a civil ceremony in 2007 in England, where Solomon has dual citizenship, and again in Connecticut in 2009.

Still, Solomon craved the kind of parental love his mother had described and embodied. After meeting a number of nontraditional families, including a lesbian couple with two children fathered by Habich, Solomon’s dream of having his own children no longer seemed so far-fetched.

The decade he spent researching his book Far From the Tree, inspired by an article he wrote about families raising children with special needs, only reinforced his belief that parenting was “profoundly rewarding” even with added difficulties.

(When Far From the Tree was published in 2012, it won a number of honors—including the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction.)

Solomon now has a biological daughter who turned 8 in November and a 6-year-old son he and Habich are raising in New York City. Although his daughter lives mostly in Texas with her mother, a longtime friend of Solomon’s, he remains very involved in the little girl’s life—and vice versa.

At first, Solomon found parenthood “very intimidating” and anxiety-provoking, but his fears have subsided as the kids have gotten older. Overall, he says parenting “has largely been helpful to my depression. When I’m only sort of depressed, having them snuggle up to me…makes me feel better.”

He knows he’s really depressed when the snuggle cure has little effect. When that happens, he fakes it: “I can mostly put on a good front with my children or people I don’t know very well.”

While fatherhood provides some balm for his depression, Solomon credits his depression for helping him become a more sensitive and empathetic parent. When Habich might dismiss some troublesome behavior as a bid for attention, “I’m more understanding of the idea that they’re not just being willful,” he reflects. “Maybe they’re really suffering.

“I guess that I have a kind of ‘awakeness’ to the idea that logic can be irrelevant to solving the problem. And I think that’s actually a good thing for parents, in general, to know.”

Vital truths

As it turns out, his ability to find value in his depression—such as his enhanced sense of empathy—might be an important key to coping. Solomon has come to believe that resilience “has to do with the way people … manage to integrate depression into the rest of their lives.”

Some people, he says, simply want to put depression behind them and forget about it. The problem is, depression has a high likelihood of recurring, “and if you cut the depression out of your description of who you are, then every time it comes back, it destroys your identity, and you’re back in that desperate place.”

On the other hand, he has met people who told him they wouldn’t have chosen depression, “but they actually have gotten strength or meaning in it.” These people are no less likely to relapse, he says. It’s just that when they do, “it will be less disruptive to their underlying character.”

When Solomon has relapses, such as a minor depression this past summer, “I’m better at managing them than I used to be,” he says. And in between episodes, “I live with an intensity I never anticipated.”

Solomon has often said that the opposite of depression is not happiness but vitality, something that “feels different when you have known its absence.” He counts every day that he wakes up free of depressive symptoms as a celebration.

As his lecture at the DBSA conference winds down, he tells the audience that a deeper commitment to embracing life’s gifts is another byproduct of his mood disorder.

“I don’t look forward to depression in the future, but I think depression in my past pressed me every day to find and choose and cling to the reasons for joy in this world—to find marriage and a family and a life I might not have known enough to reach for otherwise.”

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